Leire Díez makes a move in the courts. The former socialist member, identified as the alleged instigator of the plot that supposedly tried to sabotage judicial investigations affecting the PSOE and the Government, has filed separate appeals before the Madrid judge Arturo Zamarriego and the magistrate of the National Court Santiago Pedraz to prevent the former from handing over his investigation of her to his colleague and for the latter to handle both cases in which she is charged in a single proceeding. Díez argues that there is no connection between the two cases cited by the two judges to merge the two investigations into one and criticizes the Central Operative Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard and Pedraz himself for having investigated “the same facts that were the subject of another procedure and under secrecy.”
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The move by the former socialist member comes after last week the magistrate of the National Court issued a judicial ruling accepting to take over the investigation that his colleague Zamarriego had kept open since July 2025 regarding the alleged maneuvers by the former PSOE member Leire Díez against the UCO and members of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office. In that judicial ruling, Pedraz accepts the decision made three days earlier by his colleague to hand over the inquiries. Zamarriego argued that both his investigation and that of his colleague were “indissolubly” linked and their clarification required “the processing of a single one.” Last Friday, officials from the Madrid courts took the 14 volumes with 3,847 pages of Zamarriego’s case to the National Court.
Now, Díez has filed separate appeals before the two judges with similar arguments. In them, she not only questions the merging of both cases but also the manner in which it was done and the circumstance that there were two investigations at the same time on the same facts. Thus, before Pedraz, the former socialist member specifically questions that the documentation from the Madrid court is already in his possession when, she recalls, she had filed a prior appeal against the decision to merge the two cases that has not yet been resolved. According to her defense, the incorporation of one case into the other could not have been carried out while appeals were pending.
In this same document, the former PSOE member insists that, in reality, there are not two different investigations connected to each other, but a single set of facts investigated in two different courts, and emphasizes the alleged irregularity that the UCO and the National Court incorporated into their inquiries facts that were already under investigation by Zamarriego’s court. “It is impossible that both the UCO and Central Court number 5 [of Pedraz] were unaware of the content of the investigation of the Instruction Court number 9 [of Madrid, headed by Zamarriego],” she stresses.
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Díez’s appeal devotes several pages to questioning whether the facts for which she was investigated in the Madrid court fall under the jurisdiction of the National Court. In this regard, she attacks the argument put forward by Pedraz to claim the case from his colleague, that his investigation was broader, covered more crimes, and involved people who were not listed as defendants in the Madrid court’s file. The defense of the former socialist member considers that the existence of people investigated in other cases is not enough by itself to bring the entire procedure to the Central Court.
In the other appeal, the one filed before Zamarriego, Díez argues that the facts investigated in his court ― the alleged maneuvers to obtain compromising information about UCO commanders and prosecutors ― have nothing to do with those that led to the opening of the case in the National Court ― alleged rigging of public contracts in which the former socialist member allegedly participated ― and therefore cannot be investigated together. In this regard, the appeal emphasizes that the first to investigate the facts was the Madrid court and that, therefore, transferring the case now to the National Court violates the right of every defendant to the judge predetermined by law. It adds that merging the two cases could cause “procedural elephantiasis.”
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